Experimenting with keeping threads on topic

[3D Sunset]

"come and go, talking of Michelangelo"

Is Thomas Stearns Eliot what you're looking for?

YES! We have the author... now, can you name the poem?

3D Sunset

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I am a little uncertain about your intended goal 3D Sunset. Could you describe the goal in a few simple sentences?

Right now I have the feeling I'm asked to follow free association and just throw out what I think about when I see your message.

I looked up recursion in the dictionary...

Recursion: See Recursion

Hi Ali,

A little background. There have been some comments made on other threads that people are surprised to see what a thread has morphed into (so to speak), and they frequently discuss topics far removed from the thread's title. Thus, it is often difficult or impossible to know what topics are being covered in a thread without reading it all. This problem is compounding as the number of members and threads increases, and we would all like a way to better focus our attention on topics of interest to us, but do want to inflict more work on the moderators (or inflict more moderator intervention on us).

So, I thought it might be fun to free associate a little bit, and use this as a sandbox for trying out ideas of how to manage these streams of consciousness, how to nudge people back on topic, and when a sub-thread might warrant its own thread. My hope would be that we can then pick the best results and start applying them to our posts and better self-moderate.

By the way, with this and my earlier reply, I have begun using one way to track sub-threads, that is by changing the "Post Subject:" line of the response from that of the thread to that of the new sub-thread. Future posts that are replies to this sub-thread will default to the new Subject.

So feel free to post whatever you like, but don't be surprised if you're called on it!

Make more sense?

3D Sunset

[Edit] Wow, I just got burned by the system. I actually posted two replies, one with the subject above, the other with the subject :"More about the purpose of this thread". But the the system scooped me, by concatenating my two successive post into one. Is there a work around for this feature?